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THEME SECTION: REPRESENTATION IN IPE

32 33

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on political institutions and citizenship. There are obviously other ways of describing the movement. For ones based on more ideological distinctions see Dion (1976) . Resnick (1977: 15-16) uses it without quotation marks, while explaining the problems of doing so. Cairns (1993 : passim) uses ROC as the adjective for 'English Canadian' nationalism . He also terms it 'essentially ... Canadian nationalism in retreat, besieged by rival Quebecois and aboriginal [sic] nationalisms' (p. 186) . This section of this article argues not that it is in retreat but that it is suffering from what Simard correctly labels 'angoisse' (1993 : 157) as it attempts to come to grips with the new circumstances of globalization. This is still a work in progress; it is too soon to say whether naming and mapping will generate a 'three nations' vision . For an overview of what she terms Anglo-Canadian nationalism and its varieties see Bashevkin (1991: chapter 1). She has also done a definitive study of the role of NAC, as a part of the nationalist movement, in opposing free trade (1991 : chapter 6) . Movements promoting these collective identities have had a substantial place in the universe of political discourse since the 1980s. Visible minorities, women, immigrants, the labour movement and church-based communities gained confidence, strength, and power from the non-party politics of the popular sector. These social movements and interest groups often act in coalition in the Action Canada network, bypassing the party system, whose capacity to present alternatives was at a new low in the 1980s (Clarke eta/., 1991 : chapter 1). Thus, these movements invented or revalorized empowering names like gays, women, the disabled, which displaced the outside-named labels of 'homos' /'queers', 'ladies', 'cripples', etc. etc. These social movement struggles paralleled the re-naming of Aboriginal peoples and blacks. For an interesting discussion of the use of history by such groups, including disputes over important dates, see Cairns (1993: 204-5). The concept of 'citizens plus', first developed by the Hawthorn report to the federal government, was taken up in the 1970 Red Paper presented to the federal government by representatives of First Nations (Weaver, 1981 : 4, 183ff.). The movement incorporates those groups who have been previously named by outsiders. One is the 'Indians' so-named by the federal government's Indian Act. Those with claims to 'status' on a reserve are organized in, inter alia, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) . Because of the visibility of this social movement organization, as well as the clientele relationship 'status Indians' have with the federal government, there is a tendency in public discourse to utilize the term 'First Nations' to cover all Aboriginal peoples. Nevertheless, because of the presence of the Metis nation in the Aboriginal community, this name is not appropriate. The Metis nation is formed by those who recognize a tie to the families originated, usually, by French-speaking men and Indian women and led in the 1860s and 1870s by Louis Riel (Chartrand, 1991: 14). A third major group is the Inuit, formerly named 'Eskimo' by outsiders. There are also organizational representatives of off-reserve and 'non-status' Aboriginal persons. The Constitution Act of 1982 recognized three Aboriginal peoples: the Indian, Inuit and Metis nations. For example, the 'two nations' discourse of Quebecois discourse can not accommodate Aboriginal nationalism, and there is a tendency to designate Aboriginal peoples in racial or ethnic terms, a naming system which they vehemently reject.

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Review of International Political Economy 2(1) Winter 1995: 117-34

The local and the global in the politi~al eco~omy of beauty: from Miss Behze to Miss World Richard Wilk Department of Anthropology, Indiana University

ABSTRACT Beauty pageants are an exemplar of global cultural flow

.

~~t_ween loca~~nd supranational production and receptio~ ~~~~hd~at~:s~~~s

IS paper Iscusses the local history and political context f b . pageantry m the Caribbean country of B r Th o eauty

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pro ~chon and Interpretation only within a narrow se ti f oca provided by the metropole. man c rame

KEYWORDS Beauty; Belize; transnational · popular culture· Caribb . ' ' ean, pageants.

INTRODUCTION

~nTh; Wri~ing of History, Michel de Certeau calls our attention

to Jan Van er _traat s well-known etching of Amerigo Vespucci d "s . Amenca p ·fi d b I covenng . , ersom e as a eautiful nude woman on the shore of th contment (1988: xxv).l The 'Other' as a feminized eroh·c powe . e new mo th · r Is a comem; m western popular culture, as Shohat demonstrates in her ~na ysis o gender and the foreign exotic in American cinema from d" Intolerance' to Carmen Miranda (1993) W t · es em Iscourses about differenc_e and otherness have constantly drawn on the power of ender in their efforts to make order of events and history. g ' T?~a~ otherness and difference are interwoven with the notions of :~~m~Ity and power in ways that no longer fit Vander Straat's straightar metaphor of woman as Europe's exotic Other. In the a es of modem travel magazines, there are hundreds of eroticized ima:esg f women on those same Caribbean beaches, but now they are whi~e

7.

© 1995 Routledge 0969- 2290


tourists, not locals. While the western woman is now eroticized in foreign territory, the 'exotic' woman has taken a place in the center o~ the western stage, in the Miss World and Miss Universe pageants, wh1ch annually attract an audience exceeding 800 million people in sixty-eight countries. In this paper I argue that difference, as nationalism, as ethnicity and as gender, travels a global circuit of power. My goal is to forge some connections between the everyday politics of nation states and the cultural politics of aesthetics, particularly feminine beauty (cf. Bhabha, 1982 and Mbembe, 1992). Most work on these connections has moved from the center outwards, assuming that the representational power emanates from the metropole, while the colonial subject is a passive victim (Holmlund, 1993). At the level where anthropologists usually work, however, the 'master narrative' often appears muted and distant, and it no longer seems totalizing. Instead, at the local level~ we often find th~ raw material of the media appropriated, recycled, remtegrated and remterpreted, worked into existing cultural patterns and locali~ed. (~ng, 1985; Liebes and Katz, 1990; Michaels, 1988). From this perspective 1t IS too easy to dismiss the commoditized western narrative of sex and difference as background noise, or a simple external source of images and cultural 'raw material'. I recognize that both of these narratives of difference exist, that each has an important place in the world . The issue is the relationship between the 'global' and the 'local' narratives of power, to use Keyman's terms. The arena where I focus attention is the system of beauty pageants, a visual discourse of identity and otherness that serves as a model, in this paper, for the way global and local cultural institutions articulate. The paper moves away from the issues of domination and. r~sistance, from the ideas of homogenizing modernity or postmodern diSJUncture. I ask not how cultural difference survives or is eliminated, but where, why and how cultural difference is promoted, and whose interests are served . I chose beauty pageants because they are widespread and heavily commercial sites where judgments of cultural value are both made and displayed . They expose the critical role of gender in t~e c?nfi.gur~tion of otherness. But the study did not begin with the global mstltutlon; mstead I began work with very local high school 'popularity' competitions, village 'talent' shows, and the town and city beauty pageants of the Caribbean country of Belize. THE SETTING

Belize, independent from Britain since 1981 , has a tiny but diverse population - fewer than 200,000 people who speak more than six languages. Today the country is increasingly cosmopolitan and gl~balized . The economy is fully open to foreign capital, the stores full of 1mports. Belizeans 118

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF BE A UT Y

themselves are transnational - their families scattered across the United States and the Caribbean, with most of the young expecting to spend part~ of their lives .a broad . Those at home are bombarded by foreign med1a - there are nme stations broadcasting a steady diet of American and Mexican satellite TV, and one can hook up to full-service cable systems in every town with more than 1,000 people (Wilk, 1993b; Oliveira , 1986). When Belizeans turn off the TV they can look out the window at an unending parade of foreign tourists, resident expatriates, retirees, and students in search of authentic local experience, traditional medicine, untouched rainforests and ancient ruins. The paradox is that at the peak of transnational influence, Belize's national and ethnic cultures have never been so strong or so distinct. Before foreign media became so pervasive, most people denied that such a thing as 'Belizean culture' existed at all. When I began to work in Belize in the early 1970s, people carefully explained to me that the numerically dominant African-European group, the descendants of slaves and their masters collectively labeled 'Creoles', had no culture of their own. They were 'really' British or Caribbean. The predominantly Spanish-speaking rural communities were 'just Mestizos', the same people as neighboring Guatemalans or Mexicans. About the only other people who seemed to believe in something called Belizean culture were politicians, especially in the nationalist Peoples United Party, which had engaged in some fitful cultural decolonization projects after achieving internal self-government in 1964. Place names were changed and national symbols chosen . English style woolen coats and ties were banned as official garb, and a plain Guayabera (Yucatec-style short-sleeve shirt) dubbed a 'Belize Jack' was briefly in vogue. The party leader and later Prime Minister George Price gave many speeches about the need to develop a Belizean culture that would bring together the country's diverse ethnic groups, sometimes hinting at American-style syncretism, but more recently favoring the pluralist metaphor of the stewpot over the blender (Judd, 1989). Today all of this has dramatically changed . Belize is awash with emblematic locally produced goods - woodcrafts, hot pepper sauces, ?oils and dresses. The local music industry is literally booming, boasting 1ts own fusion of traditional Garifuna drums with Reggae in the form of 'Punta Rock', now internationally marketed. A Belizean cuisine has appeared, first in the form of a 'Belizean Dish of the Day' at the tourist hotels and in Belizean restaurants in New York and Los Angeles. Then Belizean cookbooks appeared, and today almost every local eatery which does not serve Chinese food is advertising 'authentic Belizean food' . There is a touring national dance troupe, a national theater movement, a historical society that is designating and protecting landmarks and choosing national heros. Self-consciously Belizean painters produce oils of 119

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF BEAUTY


village life, Belizean poetry raises a patriotic voice, and there is contention for the title of the great Belizean novel. . This furious rate of cultural production is not just the preoccupation of an educated or economic elite. My national survey in 1990 found that a majority in all ethnic, occupational and income gr~ups be~ieve th~re is a national culture, and are proud of it. In ranking the1r favonte mus1c, food and entertainment, people consistently placed local p~oducts ~bove foreign imports. They rate the few local television productwns as h1ghly, or just below their favorite foreign shows. This is not to say that Belizeans in any way agree about the content or meaning of their culture. Controversy and political contest over t~e cultural content and effects of local and foreign television, sports, muslC, arts, dance, food, money, drugs and migration are intense. But 'culture' has emerged as a legitimate topic, as an objectified matter of de?ate a~d dispute in everything from political campaigns to popular radio call-m programs. . . A Belizean national consciousness and Identity, though tenuous and incomplete, has therefore emerged under the constant .internalized ga.ze of the foreigner . Keyman in his essay suggests, draw.mg ~n Chatte~Jee (1986), that while nationalism presents itself as the antithesis of colomalism, it actually draws on the same system of signification. The p.r oblem I pose below is how this system is structured, constructed and mamt~me?, how it manages to structure difference in ways that create and mamtam an underlying order (see Lofgren, 1989). I suggest that t~is g~obaliz~ng system of difference is built upon temporal rhythms, spatial hierarchies, and essentialized age and gender. By making all of these orders appear in some way 'natural', global systems of difference suppress and co~ceal other kinds of variation . They channel personal, regional and national heterogeneity in ways that simultaneously conf~r certa~n kinds. of ~o';er and remove other kinds, leading to a process I hken to domesticatiOn of difference.

CULTURE AND DIFFERENCE Anthropologists have traditionally used an essential.i~ed concept of culture as a primordial identity, a natural p~econd1tion to colonial conquest. For several generations, anthropologists sought to uncover precolonial authentic culture, which led them .to ~ortray recent forms of identity and discourse as inauthentic or lackmg m substance. R~cent critiques have led to a fundamental questioning of these assumptions; Jonathan Friedman, for example, argues that cultural identity .al~ays requires a significant 'Other' (Friedman, 1990: 321). Cult~re IS Itself relational, rather than being a simple corpus of customs, practices, knowledge and things. 120

At the same time, the field of cultural relations has continually broadened, th.r ough new technologies of trade, transport and communication. The Behzean example . seems to fit into an emerging picture of global cultura.l process, descnbed by anthropologists like Appadurai, Hannerz and Fnedman_. They tell ~s that global trends encompass both unifying and fragmenting. ten.denCJes: that global structures organize diversity, rather than rephcatmg umformity (to paraphrase Hannerz (1990]). Perhaps ~not~er way to say this is that while different cultures continue to .b e qmte d1fferent ~nd d~stinct, they are becoming different in very umfor~ :--vays. The dimensions across which they vary are becoming more limited, and therefore more mutually intelligible. Pa.rt ?f the problem of defining these contradictory processes is a contmumg fundamental confusion between cultural content and cultural process. At the l~v~l of ~heory, we may have moved far beyond a notion of culture as static Identity rooted in timeless tradition, of cultural boundaries as ph~sical borders: and of cultural content as a fixed corpus or ~anon . But ~~ the culture Itself, these ideas remain firmly enmeshed, and m the pract~ce of social ~cience they emerge repeatedly. The Boasian a.nthropologis.ts of the mid-twentieth century mistook cultural traits _ li~ts. of m~tenal culture, kinship terms and the like - for culture itself. Similarly, m looking at global processes in the latter part of the century, we have ten~ed to look at the spread of things, knowledge, ideas and goo?~, as evidence of the spread of global culture. In this we follow the familiar folk-model which sees every entry of a foreign product as evidence of the loss of authentic local culture, as with the French government's attempts to ban Coca Cola in the 1950s (Kuisel, 1993). We imp~icitly .accept this model of culture, even when we try to make the ~ppos1te pam~: that global media or goods are effectively localized and mcorporated mto local cultural lexicons. A recent book on Japanese consumer ~ulture m~kes exactly this point, arguing that the Japanese have eff~ctively locahz.ed and absorbed foreign cultural objects and product~, Without dr~matically changing their underlying cultural practices (Tobm, 199~) . Th1s can be an attractive argument, since it promises cultural resistance and the coexistence of modified intact local '!itt! ' with a global 'great' cosmopolitan culture. If we follow log1c far enough, we can lull ourselves into thinking that the global spread of goods and culture is nothing new, that each culture will just absorb global culture and recontextualize it. And there have been a ~umber . of ex~ellent recent anthropological studies of how foreign and ~nternational Ideas and objects are effectively localized - incorporated mto local systems of meaning and value, in the contexts of long-standing local struct~res of power (see Thomas, 1992; Manning, 1990). This is what James Carner has called the 'It' s All Right, They've Appropriated It' school of thought (personal communication, 1993).

tra~itions

th~s

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THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF BEAUT Y THEME SECTION : REPRESENTATION IN !PE

I in this essentialized concept of How can we move away fromdapp yb Yary or corpus of traits, at the culture as static content, a share valet~ u h ' s? Elsewhere drawing on b I It I flows and rea wns Ip . ' . level of glo a cu ura d f a focus on contests over meamng, McCracken (1988), I have argueh. ~\h· and symbols are given conat the relatio~s of po_wer by w ~~fine~~~sthis way, an understanding of trasting meamngs (Wilk, 1990). t lexicon of goods, symbols global culture cannot focus on contenh' on t a study the common set of . f k l dge Instead we ave o and bits o now e . diate knowledge and signifying practice; formats and structures that me f h ' of the meanings attached to . th n a flow o t mgs, or . somethmg more a alan which those things and meamngs things, or even the .channels b~ found in globalized forms of contest flow . Global ~ulture mstead mus:hat to produce, consume, watch , read for the exercise of power over and write. CHALLENGING THE HEGEMONY OF DIFFERENCE .

. . . l come into contact, there can be physiCal When groups of pe~ple mitial y but no cultural flow . Without a common contest and economic exchange, . th t a concept of culture to make sense of each others' difference, WI ou . t ract but without contact. difference intelligible, two groups may In et d, the Maya for the first . h t Spamsh encoun ere When the sixteent -cen ury d threats but each interpreted d b 'ects war s, even ' time, they ex.c h ange. ~ J h ework of their own history, mythology the other entuely Withm t e ram ore than a proJ·ection of the .. h the 'Other' was no m . d and poht!CS. For eac , 1992) Maya and Spanish soCial an antithes~s of the self (Todaro~, material was exchanged, but they had economic systems touched an . in their differences. no common ways of conceptuahz g . mpire had imposed Spanish . . d d ars the conquenng e . d Withm a hun re ye ' . d d ' fferences between Spamsh an · f' t' which create I systems of classt lea wn F r hundreds of years Maya Maya that were intelligible to bot~ grodups. o t of interpretations of the . l 1 ften hmge on a se .. resistance to coloma ru ~ o dM that undercut Spanish legitimacy difference between Spamard an aya essed in a common idiom, and and power, but these differences were efxpl r 'fyi' ng practices. Generations . d h ed system o c assi . were predicate on a s ar f 11 truggled to understand this of anthropologists have unskuccefss u yltusration imposition, emulation . . h' framewor o accu , 'l situation Wit m a . . d It ' All these notions are bUI t on a and absorption, of 'Idols behm a darsd .. ventory (Keyman's 'sociologif lture as boun e m h . ·d taxonomiC I ea ~ cu . ' The realit is more complex, for bot cal/ anthropologiCal paradi.gml ). I syystem of signification, which . . t d ·n a smg e camp ex ) groups participa e. I . f renee and identity (see Hawkins, 1984 . organized perceptions of dlf e the Maya as elsewhere, ean power among ' . . f E The extension o urop . d .f . the ways in which vanous required a means of descnbmg an c1assi ymg

f

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peoples were different from each other and from Europeans. But each situation of contact and domination modified and adapted both local and European models of difference, producing local common systems. In Belize the systems that have classified people (including terms for ethnic groups), the social construction of gender and culture, have changed dynamically through time, often in concert with economic and political developments (Judd, 1989; Wilk, 1986). What classifying systems have in common is that from a huge range of variation in appearances and practice, each chose a particular kind of difference and made it the basis for dividing humans into groups and ranking them. Each then ascribed these differences to nature. Few of these systems of difference have been truly hegemonic, in the sense of having been universally accepted. But actively engaging in resistance is itself transforming, it creates a kind of intimacy that validates the very categories of difference in dispute, as the Comaroffs show in their discussion of the encounter between missionaries and Tswana in South Africa (1986). Even when the Tswana rejected the content of Christian teachings, they were forced to do so using categories of difference used by Christians. They accepted that they were non-Christians, and ended up objectifying their own culture in opposition to that of Europeans. 2 The recasting of oppressed people's culture as a mirror image of the oppressor is a recurring theme in the anthropological study of colonized peoples. As Fanon pointed out, resistance can be a form of accommodation or even imitation. When local culture is revived and revitalized, it is often recast in new terms in opposition to the foreign . In doing so, locals accept particular kinds of difference as significant. Power in this cultural realm is the ability to totally ignore the values, categories and meanings of another culture. Hollywood can ignore Belize, but Belize cannot ignore Hollywood . When Belizeans create national television in opposition to foreign, imported programs, they work within visual and thematic forms created in Hollywood . The result is a kind of Belizean '60 Minutes'. Hollywood has created the space within which Belizeans are 'free' to define themselves (Wilk, 1993b). Does this mean that local systems of difference have been overcome by a single master narrative that frames and therefore displaces all prior forms of identity? Jonathan Friedman has discussed a variety of ways that local cultural systems have interacted with a hegemonic western modernism in a 'global arena of potential identity formation' (1992: 837). He equates hegemony and homogeneity, and sees the recent revival of local ethnic nationalisms as symptoms of the breakdown of that pervasively powerful modernism. In his view , the master narrative is passing, and so are the subaltern dialogues with which it was engaged . I would argue, instead , that the nature of cultural hegemony may be 123

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changing, but it is hardly disappearing, and the consequence is not dehomogenization or global fragmentation. The new global cultural system promotes difference instead of suppressing it, but selects the dimensions of difference. The local systems of difference that developed in dialogue with western modernism are becoming globalized and systematized into structural equivalents of each other. This globalized system exercises hegemony not through content, but through form. In other words, we are

a~d they can only compete within that category. At the same time other kmds of distinctions were deliberately muted; boys and girls could be on the sam.e .team together though most competitors were girls. There was no exphc1t menhon of race or ethnicity, though all the teams but one were all-black or all-white, and there was a powerful subtext of rich white suburbs pitted against the black city. The teams were surrounded adult coaches, clearly family members and friends, tied together by mtensely local networks in which they invested tremendous energy and large amounts of money with little hope of reward . ~~ heard interviews with the winners and coaches after each compehhon; they spo.ke of the way the sport uplifted and disciplined performers, 'developmg self-respect' and giving the kids a chance for travel and experience .. But ,besi.des becoming cosmopolitans, they developed a sense.of local ~nde: Seem ourselves last year on TV was real important, espeCially comm from a small town like we do.' As performance, play beco~es cultural work, part of the rhythm of discipline and release that 1s such a familiar part of capitalist consumerism (see Nichter and Nichter, 1991) .

not all becoming the same, but we are portraying, dramatizing and communicating our differences to each other in ways that are more widely intelligible. The globalizing hegemony is to be found in what I call structures of common difference , which celebrate particular kinds of diversity while submerging , deflating or suppressing others. The global system is a common code, but its purpose is not common identification, but instead the expression of distinctions, boundaries and disjunctures, in ways that subtly serve particular groups and interests. STRUCTURES OF COMMON DIFFERENCE

?Y

If, as I propose above, there is a growing global system of common difference, busy incorporating and colonizing existing distinctions between people, where might we look for its advancing edges? I would like to bring up two examples, the first based on a single observation and the second resulting from several months of fieldwork and observation . One night in 1993 I happened to stay up late watching cable television, which I do not have at home, but remember from my last stay in Belize. Long after midnight I strayed onto ESPN, the sports channel, and to my surprise encountered the final events of the American Double-Dutch League Jump Rope Championships, for the 4th grade through high school. I had thought jumping rope was a simple recreation, the unregulated fun of kids at play, but here it was presented with all the features of a professionalized contest - the moves were named and standardized, along with a precision scoring system based on skill and difficulty. The performances were divided into required compulsory patterns, and 'free style' expressive and artistic performances, graded separately. There were corporate sponsors, a panel of judges, computerized scores flashed on the screen following slow-motion replays, and truly dazzling, well practiced performances by teams of young people in matching costumes and designer sportswear. Stepping back and looking at the contest as a cultural system, it is clear how it organizes both time and space - there is a hierarchy of regional competitions from local through state, regional and nationals, an annual season starting in the spring, and a sense of continuity as teams come back year after year, and players become coaches. The events classify performers by age grades -all team members have to be in a narrow range,

. I h.ave to say I a:n not mu.ch o~ a sports fan, but I found this program nvetmg. Before a tmy late-mght msomniac audience, I found the cutting edge of global ~apitalist culture, and a model for what I have been seeing and. expenencmg over the last twenty years of work in Belize. The N~t~on~l Double Dutch Lea.gue (based in Washington DC) is professionahzm? JUmp rope as a pubhc performance, taking a lived , contextualized trad1h~n of play and turning it into a commodity. The contest formalizes a pa~hcular set .of distinctions and places them in the foreground, while n:ovmg ot~ers mto the background. It reifies and emphasizes particular kmds of hiera.rchy based o~ time and geopolitical space, and it groups people accordmg to some kmds of physical biological characteristics but not others. The competition is exactly what Bourdieu (1984) means' as a prachce that 'classifies and classifies the classifier' . Since watching the rope jumpers, I' ve noted other similar events from professional ~allroom dancing to the national mixed doubles fre~ style canoe champwnsh1ps (covered in Paddler magazine). The contest seems to be an .e~pecially pote~t social for:n in which difference is expressed, ~ommod1fled, and contamed, a cruCJal site where difference is rationalIzed and naturalized to create equivalency between different social groups. The jump rope contest calls attention to a process which 1 have been studying in Belize, where beauty pageants have become extremely popular public events. These pageants began in B~lize right after the Second World War. They were sponsored and . orgamzed by two contending political parties, who made ~h~ crownm~ of queens the centerpieces of their respective annual patnohc celebratiOns. The first pageant was started by a loyalist

124

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THEME SECTION : REPRESENTATION IN IPE

middle-class Creole political movement which arose during the 1930s and 1940s.3 As nationalist and anti-British sentiment grew more prevalent during the Second World War, the urban middle class, who dominated the civil service, reacted by forming the 'Loyal and Patriotic Order of the Baymen' in 1945. This group organized neighborhoods into 'lodges' modeled on existing fraternal and Masonic organizations. The lodges functioned as social and political clubs, whose main public activities revolved around the annual celebration of the Battle of St George's Cay on 10 September. While the nationalists and trade unionists argued that the British were dominating and exploiting the country, the LPOB stressed their pride in being part of the British Empire. Celebrating the Battle of StGeorge's Cay dramatized the identity of British Hondurans with the British, for this heavily mythologized eighteenth-century event was supposedly a time when Baymen (as the local white inhabitants were then known), slaves and British troops stood 'shoulder to shoulder' to drive back an armed Spanish attempt to enforce their (quite legal) claim to the area. The Baymen were eulogized by the LPOB for their 'Deeds that won an Empire' . The Queen of the Bay pageant was added to the annual celebration in 1946 at the instigation of several older women in the LPOB. They conceived of the Queen competition to bring the lodges together, and add respectability to the parade. One of the organizers told me the goal was to 'bring up' (give status to) the celebration; she kept careful track of the girls' family background and personal character and made sure they had no babies: 'we were looking for a real queen.' A contemporary contestant looking back said: 'The black colonials acted like she was the real Queen Elizabeth, they wanted someone who would be like royalty as part of their celebrations.' The neighborhoods competed not only to select a winning contestant, but also to raise money to clothe her in the latest imported fashions . The LPOB strategy in staging the pageant was consistent with its general policy of trying to merge the political issue of independence and self-government, with the cultural arena of respectability, education and 'taste' . Beneath both the political and cultural agenda was the unspoken social agenda of continuing the privileged position of a small, educated middle class in a stagnant and marginal local economy. Faced with rapidly increasing populist and anti-British sentiment, the LPOB tried to broaden the appeal of the pageant to include contestants from outside Belize City. In 1950 they relabeled the selection of the Queen of the Bay as the 'National Beauty Pageant' . The nationalist People's Committee, prevented from direct economic or political action through harsh libel and labor laws, attacked the colonial order in its symbolic heart. In 1950 their supporters attended the tenth celebration, but wore the Committee's colors of blue and white instead of 126


the Union Jack. They refused to participate in the celebration of the Battle of StGeorge's Cay, and publicly questioned whether the battle had ever really occurred (this is still a heated controversy in the newspapers every September). The political party (the Peoples United Party) that emerged from this movement quickly created its own flag and song. The colonial gov~rnor re~~onded to th~ir demonstrations with a state of emergency, and m 1950 Jailed most of Its leaders for sedition. Amidst this turmoil, as the British rewrote the colonial constitution, with its leaders in jail, the Peoples United Party plotted not a revolution, but a beauty pageant _ 'Miss British Honduras'. The PUP committees in each district selected contestants, who were presented in local meetings that were notable more for th~ir lack of British trappings than for the presence of anything local (Amencan styles and popular songs were prominent). Significantly, the winner's prize was a trip to Guatemala, a strong statement of the PUP's policy of seeking closer ties with its Hispanic neighbors instead of the British Caribbean. The spread of beauty pageants went along with the extension of political parties into the countryside. The very first local beauty pageants m many towns and villages in 1950 sparked heated controversies, for the selection of a single local Queen in public made it clear what faction was locally dominant. The newspapers were full of letters complaining that Que~ns were sele~ted :~ndemocratically', in a secretive way, favoring candidates for their pohhcal connections rather than beauty or elegance. The Peoples United Party won the struggle for power during the 1950s, dominating all the national elections under the colonial regime of the 1960s and 1970s, and eventually leading the country to full independence in .1981. ~iss British. Honduras became Miss Independence and finally Miss Behze. The rulmg party, secure in its power, built a hierarchy of urb~n, district and national competitions, sent contestants to regional Canbbean pageants, and by the early 1970s had a local franchise for Miss World . The opposition party always kept its own pageant and Queen, and continued to celebrate the colonial holiday, and when it finally defeated the PUP in 1984 to take over the national government, it also took over the Miss Belize pageant, which merged for a time with the Queen of the Bay. When the PUP took over again in 1990, the nation once again had two national pageants. By this time there were also a host of other pageants, some of which form part of a national system, and some of which are explicitly local (Miss Excelsior High School), are organized purely for entertainment (Ms Modern Fashion), or belong to a particular ethnic or regional constituency (Miss Garifuna, Miss Panamericana). Today the organizers and sponsors of the major national pageants see them as events that unite the nation in diversity - following the official plur~list lin.e of the ~tate that each ethnic group contributes something to a umque mix. As Miss Teen Belmopan 1990 put it: 'Even though we all a 127


different race, Belize da one place.' The pageants attempt to organize and domesticate differences between Belizeans, by an appeal to objective standards of beauty and talent. They also provide a common code for the expression of differences between Belizeans. Contestants often dress in fancied regional or ethnic costumes, perform 'ethnic' dances or sing 'ethnic' songs, and may themselves be considered official representatives of particular groups (though this is by no means universal). Sometimes a person of one ethnic group will dress in the costume of another. Where no recognizable 'traditional' folk-dress exists, they are created. But as each pageant progresses towards the semi-finals, the ethnic themes are dropped and national unification takes over. Speeches, songs and discussion focus on Belizean culture and nationalism. In the semi-final interviews, contestants are often asked questions about the country which call for patriotic answers. In 1990 the aspiring Miss Belize candidates were asked 'What would you as a Belizean, selling your country to tourists, tell them about Belize?' The responses mentioned the democratic government, the harmony among diverse people, and the natural environment's touristic attractions. 'Belize is rich in natural beauty and we should be proud of it.' 'Belize is peaceful and democratic.' 'Belize is truly a paradise.' 'Belize is a curious colorful mixture of cultures such as the Maya, the Mestizo, Garifuna, Creole, Lebanese and East Indians. I am proud to be part of this mixture.' Such questions explicitly situate Belize in the foreigner's gaze; they project Belize outwards as a unique place, in the common descriptive terms of all the unique places that make up a global pageant. The pageant is one means by which the government has sought to make ethnicity, a potentially dangerous and divisive issue, into something ornamental and safe (see Wilk and Chapin, 1989). As long as it remains focused on artistic performance, the government sponsors ethnic expression . Safe ethnic culture is attractive to tourists, part of an international genre of 'our nation's wonderful diversity'; it is safely disengaged from the inequities in land, labor and rights which are so visible to a social scientist in the countryside, but which are rarely spoken of in public life. When ethnicity takes on a political, economic or territorial nature, the government has reacted with repression, bribery or cooptation that takes the form of support for 'safe' projects (Moberg, 1992). When the Maya in the southern districts formed an organization to press for land rights in 1984, the government response was to offer them money and equipment for videotaping their ritual dances (Wilk and Chapin, 1989). Pageants also make ethnicity safe by subordinating cultural identity to gender and sexuality. The contestants first appear clothed in ethnic garb, as representatives of their 'people'. But in the next step the contestants appear in bathing suits, as bodies stripped of their external cultural 128


costume. Since skin color and features are so heterogeneous among Belizeans, in bathing suits ethnicity is gone; the woman remains. Gender transcends the ethnic, but what transcends gender? The final transformation of the image of woman in the pageant occurs when symbolically naked essentialized sexual objects are reclothed, but this time as cr~atures of modernity and fashion. The evening-gown competition bnn~s the contestants back on stage transformed into cosmopolitans, ':eanng the latest expensive imported dresses, showing their sophistication and knowledge of the world outside Belize. The flow of imagery in the pageant makes representational order by linking together different feminine images. We start with woman submerged . in t~e localized, ethnic and 'primordial' community, strip away that Identity to reveal woman-as-body as something supposedly more basic and essential, and end with woman transformed by modernity into a tr~nscending figure ready to move outwards to the global stage. (There IS a clear structural parallel to the classic stages of a rite of passage.) Beauty pageants also organize and objectify other kinds of differences. Like the jump rope contests they channel space and time, space into a hierarchy and time into annual cycles of competition, linked by the careers of the participants. They provide regular institutions that link small communities of competitors and supporters together into larger and larger structures reaching upwards to a global level. Like jump rope, pageants make an appeal to objectivity in their competitive distinctions, through 'objective' judges, a scoring system, and displays of both innate talent and acquired skill. Like other competitions, they classify the participants by essentialized characteristics - originally the pageants were open only to 16 to 24-year-olds, but now there is a full array of Miss Teen, Miss Preteen, Ms Elegant, Ms Middle Age and Ms Maturity pageants. One organizer told me she planned a 'Miss Big and Beautiful' pageant for 'larger' women. And also like the rope jumpers, they publicly justify pageantry as educational and uplifting for the contestants, a chance for them to become cosmopolitan, gain poise and begin careers. The cultural forms of pageants do not speak with a single voice, nor is their .message always effective or convincing. Their ostensible purpose is to bnng people together as equals, to promote a common identity and build support for a particular party, goals that are themselves contradictory in a highly stratified, factionalized and ethnically divided nation . The pageants inevitably dramatize particular kinds of difference in ways that the organizers do not intend . Doubt and division enter the pageant partly because the event derives some of its power from the tension between foreground and background, onstage and backstage. The audience knows that the public performance is only a part of the story, and that there is a world 'behind the scenes' where the competition 129



is anything but objective and fair (Cohen, 1991 ). On the one hand there is a public contest of open democracy, with a public display of bodies and talents, and experts who vote on contestants according to ostensibly objective standards. On the other hand there is a hidden, covert process of the exercise of power and privilege, where factions scheme and maneuver for advantage and influence, in ways the public can only imagine or gossip about. Public conversation about the pageant is dominated by speculation about influence and conspiracy. Both systems of power, the objective stage and the scheming backstage, share legitimacy, and in many ways they are dependent on each other. One consequence of these mixed messages is that selecting a beauty queen always brings forward existing divisions within the community. The crowd at a pageant identifies candidates with factions- ethnic, class, political and familial- and acts as if the pageant is a struggle for power. When the winner is unpopular, the crowd is angry, and complains that the contest was rigged, that the process was not really open or democratic. So the pageant foregrounds both the divisions between factions in the community and the differences between the politics of public democracy and those of private power and influence. In a similar way, the jump rope competition builds on the tensions between the 'natural' physical abilities of some contestants, and others' privileged access to trainers, facilities, practice time and expensive equipment and clothing. While there is controversy and difference among organizers, participants and audiences at pageants and beauty competitions, these disputes are inherently local. They draw their power from an array of local powers and participants, and they cannot be decoded without local knowledge. This is the context in which the global, foreign institution of the beauty pageant has been appropriated and localized, made Belizean . If analysis stopped at this point, we would have a story about how foreign models of gender and identity are absorbed into the local scene and given a new cultural content (Arnauld and Wilk, 1984). But a second level of complexity emerges more clearly when we look at the highest level of competition in Belize to choose the candidates that will go onwards to the global stages. Here we find that pageants simultaneously look inwards to the kinds of distinctions Belizeans make among themselves, and outward through the ways they portray themselves to the global 'Other's' gaze.

Miss Universe pageant (in 1979 - most Belizeans still remember her name). So why participate? The local organizer of the Miss Universe pageant said it concisely: 'To show we can compete with the rest of the worl~.' Even f~r the losers, the contest asserts a kind of categorical equahtr, a.n d bemg the underdog can have more of a nationalizing effect than wmnmg. How else can one explain the role of that famous Olympic performance by the Jamaican bobsled team? This categorical equality has a key focus on the concept of beauty, and the en.counter be~e~~ the loc~l and th: g~obal hinges on the way beauty orgamzes and obJectifies relations of Similarity and difference. In interviews with organizers and contestants, I was told that Belizeans cannot win international competitions because they have different standards of beauty from foreigners . As one organizer said,

LOCAL AND GLOBAL DIFFERENCE

An inescapable reality of Belize's global position is that it simply has no chance of winning a major contest. These days winning requires professional coaches and fabulously expensive wardrobes. In twenty years only one Belizean contestant even made it to the final group of twelve in the 130

The international judges like tall, thin and beautiful girls. In Belize they like girls who are shorter- here 5 feet 6 inches is tall, and stockier. To qualify for Belizean men, you must have some shape, you must have bust and hips. It's something completely different. If you choose a girl for the international competition the Belizean men will say 'E too maaga.' [She's too thin.] Bones alone, not enough flesh . But them [foreign] judges will look at the Belizean girl and say 'E too fat.' Part of the drama of the contest, then, is the collision between local standards of beauty, deeply embedded in cultural constructs of gender and sexuality, and international standards which are widely believed to be those of the dominant white nations of the North. But these separate realms are also unified through the common notion of beauty; the differences between local and global become different 'standards' within a single framework. Standards of beauty in Belize are inherently difficult and dangerous social and political territory because, as elsewhere in the Americas, color has always been indexical with social status (e.g. Graham, 1990). Blackness, a~d ~eatures la.beled 'black', are unequally distributed, are actively discnmma ted agamst and I or considered 'ugly' by many Belizeans. Thus, the national pageants can highlight class and ethnic discrimination based on color, rather than resolving or eliminating it. The organizers of Belizean national pageants are frustrated by differences in 'standards' . They say they could find Belizean women who could be 'Miss World', but the local pageants must first please a Belizean audience with a different agenda. This discourse about beauty emphasizes the highly local, contextualized nature of Belizean pageants. Local organizers told me that 'the real reason' why Belizean pageants don't produce international competitors, is because the judges and crowds favor contestants because of political, ethnic, class and kinship connections. In a country as 131



small as Belize, nobody is anonymous - all the contestants' connections are known. The most common public discussion of the reasons why one woman won are comments on the contestants' wealth, ethnicity, political patronage or family connections. In this folk-model, beauty as a transcendent abstraction is constantly engaged in struggle with politics and corruption. Similarly, the Caribbean and African holders of Miss Universe franchises have periodically argued that the pageant unfairly favors light-skinned women with European features, concealing a neocolonialist racist agenda beneath a fa